07-17-2018, 01:31 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-17-2018, 01:44 PM by gayprojectforum.)
Obstacles to relationships of love
One of the most impeding obstacles to the creation of true relationships of love is the considerable difference in social rank between the partners. In order to open up completely to the other, you must considered him at the same level as you, if this doesn't happen a true relationship of love cannot be established. The mental reservations linked to the difference in social rank are among the most difficult to overcome.
Sex can also be a terrible means of blackmail or violence and I speak of both the imposed and the denied sex. Saying no, sometimes flaunting moralistic excuses for one's refusal can hurt deeply, because it implies a negative moral judgment. Shared sex is not an indispensable component in a relationship of love.
The distinction between friendship and love based on the absence or on the presence of sexual involvement starts from a completely different concept of love that seams to presuppose that behind sex there is always a true affective dimension, but things are usually very different. The presence of a sexual component can be completely disconnected from a deep human contact with the other and can respond to needs of a strictly individual type, not therefore of communication and couple, in this case sex has nothing to do with loving for each other. It is not the presence or absence of sexuality in a relationship that identifies it as a relationship of love, but the ability to deeply understand the reasons and dignity of the other. There are situations in which, unconsciously, one believes he is in love, but one does not understand the real needs of the other and this happens because the acceptance of the other is subordinated to preconceptions of various kinds, to issues of social role, to the desire to find a sexual satisfaction that ends up making the other only an instrument and ultimately to the idea of not spending completely oneself maintaining in any case one’s own mental reservations, that is the long series "of but and if" that accompany a choice that shouldn't be conditioned.
What does individual satisfaction have to do with all this? In a relationship of love individual satisfaction lies in the smile of the other, in feeling capable of making the other person feel good, in diminishing his suffering, in seeing that the relationship is not lost in time but rather strengthens, and when this happens, in understanding that you are really important for the other person.
Fake falling in love and sexual exploration
Love doesn’t create bonds, doesn’t create implicit pacts of fidelity, doesn’t set limits to the other, doesn’t require exclusive or definitive choices, has an intimate fragility that doesn’t make it in any way similar to a contract, which is why it has a very high human value, because it allows two people to understand each other deeply and feel deeply close.
All the mechanism described above, which can lead a guy to live the most beautiful experiences of life, can however easily get stuck and can lead to very embarrassing situations that can be summed up in the concept of false falling in love. It happens unfortunately that many guys, often for not having under their eyes real examples of emotional life, especially in the family, are led to consider as a "falling in love" what is really a "false falling in love", that is essentially an emotional state that is not caused by the establishment of deep personal relationships with another guy but by the push to experiment sexuality.
Basically in a false falling in love we see in the other not an end but an instrument that allows us to experience the couple sexuality, therefore a selfish dimension prevails that in true falling in love totally gives way to the love for the other and to his centrality.
The instrumental dimension of the other manifests itself in the immediate sexualization of the relationship, which often also intervenes at the first meeting. It should be noted that for guys the confusion between a true falling in love and a false falling in love is determined by almost unconscious factors, but the false falling in love, which is systematically expressed in the same language as the true one, can mislead the other guy, in terms of affective evaluation of the seriousness of the relationship, which presents itself as a love relationship but has basically egoistic motivations and hides a vision of the other as an instrument of sexual exploration.
A very characteristic aspect of the explorative will that characterizes the false falling in love lies in the fact that very often between two guys the exploratory will is reciprocal as the mutual unconscious attempt to strumentalize the other. When this happens, and it is a fairly common thing, between very young and even not so young people, there is still a sense of an affective complementarity that anyway doesn’t have the depth of a true love.
The true discrimination lies in the altruistic or selfish dimension of the relationship. When a very young gay guy falls in love with another very young guy he must ask himself many questions that may be typically summarized as follows.
A) Am I really in love with him? That is, am I willing to put him, as a person, in the first place, putting apart my ideas and my sexual fantasies to always do what is best for him?
B) Is his person and his sexuality an object of absolute respect for me?
If the answers to the these question, which are the fundamental ones concerning me, are positive, that is, if I feel in love with him, I must ask myself many other things concerning him:
a) Is he aware that I’m in love with him? Or does he not live it rather as a beautiful friendship? (which happens frequently when you fall in love with straight guys and not only).
b) Is he gay or not gay? Typical question that always anguish gay guys in real life when they fall in love with guys whose sexual orientation they don’t know.
c) To what extent can I talk to him about me? Is he ready to accept the idea that a guy can fall in love with him? Can I tell him that when I'm on the phone with him I'm erect all the time and that I masturbate thinking of him, or would such a confession disturb him? d) How can I get to understand what is really good for him? A fundamental observation: if a guy masturbates thinking of another guy and this second guy doesn’t know it, the first guy doesn’t do anything wrong, but between masturbating thinking of a guy and building a serious emotional relationship with him there is really an abyss.
Especially when it comes to very young boys, it is absolutely essential that emotional contact develops gradually, over a long period of time, in order to allow really conscious choices . Never upset the soul of the guy you love with the request of continuous confirmations of his feelings towards you or with the request to go further, leave him free, don’t create anxiety, don’t put him in anguish. If you love him, accept him for what he is, any attempt to change him to bring him to be more in accordance with your desires is a symptom of possessiveness and selfishness, in essence of false falling in love.
Behaviors that are not dictated by love but by the desire for sexual experimentation can deeply hurt the soul of a very young boy who may have invested all himself in the construction of a love story or what seemed like a love story. Such behaviors, truly deplorable, often leave indelible marks both in the boy who feels the sensation of being used by his partner and who could convert his love into hate and remain deeply conditioned by this experience (even more if it is the first), and in the boy who has realized later that he had created a trauma to his partner.
Gay sex with lightness
So far I have tried to summarize the meaning of gay sexuality lived in a relationship of love. Obviously gay sexuality also exists outside a relationship of love. Sexuality can also be taken lightly, I mean with lightness, not with superficiality, that is, it can be lived consciously, on both sides, without a real emotional involvement, the thing can present some risk but it happens quite frequently. To try to explain what is meant by the expression "live sexuality lightly" I will start from an email I received on 21/3/2009.
"Hello project, I thought back to our chat last night and, perhaps there are things you didn’t come to understand, that is, for you something is white or is black, but I think in what you say there are still many prejudices, especially about sex without love. Maybe you've forgotten how you feel when you're 20, because in the things you say, I perceive some moralism and detachment from reality, at least from my reality.
It's a fact that boys love sex and it's not that they only like it when they are living an engaging love story that maybe will be the one that will mark their life, no, boys always like sex, and even forty-year-olds are inclined to have sex whenever it's possible, certainly not with everyone, because we are not attracted sexually by everyone, but when I see a boy I like, I fantasize about that boy and not only fantasize, then maybe I don’t do anything because he is straight or because I'm not too much interested in him, but if, for example, I go on vacation this summer and find a nice boy at the beach, why should I say no to him? And why should I say no to myself? Of course with all the prudence in terms of prevention, on this you are completely right, but why should I miss such an opportunity? What would I have done wrong if I really had had sex with that boy? Of course if it is possible and always saving health.
I feel the sexual drive very strong and it is not necessarily something that must lead me to eternal love. When it comes to heterosexuals there is a complication: the girl can get pregnant and there the thing of not looking just for sex makes sense, but between two guys? Anyway, let's say that if I were engaged or if he was engaged, then also for the sake of my boyfriend or his … ok, avoiding having sex could be justified, but when we are two boys who don’t have a boyfriend why sex must be put aside? Maybe I misunderstood what you said, but from your words I understood this. But why can we not take things lightly? Okay sex, let's say, as a form of love, but why not say yes to sex even as fun, as a game? Then when I’ll have a boy. He will probably be enough for me, but now I don’t have anybody and I don’t understand why I cannot have fun with a bit of sex, and then, according to what I hear, the guys have sex whenever they can, even if they do many beautiful speeches about love etc. etc. .. But guys on the porn sites what are they looking for? Are they looking for the true love? For the love that should last a lifetime? They only go there to look for a bit of fun and then when you're with a guy you like, there is no serious reason to put the idea aside! And then sex is a healthy fun, it's not like drugs or alcohol, it does not ruin your health. It seems to me that you still consider sex a thing that can only be done if in the context of a kind of marriage between two guys that follows very much the classical model of marriage, a promise of eternal love and fidelity, etc. etc .. I want to add something, in everything you said last night this is the only thing on which I don’t agree and I feel more free than you, maybe I could say younger than you, for the rest I can just say that it made me enormously pleased to meet you because you made me reflect on many things, let's say, on the most serious ones, and I thank you for this.
Fabio"
This e-mail was published on the Forum and received a very significant comment from another guy, I quote below this comment.
"Personally I didn’t notice any irritation in the guy's mail, but just an attempt to explain his personal point of view and a different hierarchy of values, in which sex has an almost physiological role, I seemed to understand, regardless of falling in love. Having fun, as people say, and also experiencing have importance in themselves. Personally I think that the phase of sexual experimentation is inevitable and is almost physiological. Already as a child, each of us begins to experience one’s own instincts, in the sense of starting to live them and have to deal with them. This phase is inevitable and in my opinion we only need to equip ourselves to live it in the best way. The damages that a blind experimentation can cause are not only those related to health. In a person's instability, these blind and repeated attempts to satisfy sexual and emotional drives can have devastating effects on the construction of self.
I add an issue that seemed to me a little neglected in all these discussions. Fabio rightly points out that certain things are also made by straight people. Of course, yes, among other things, this doesn’t mean that straight people do well. But there is a very interesting point on which I’d like to reflect and it is the night life. I find very appropriate this metaphor of day and night, of light understood as transparency and linearity and of night as hiding, imprisonment.
Relying on the chats and clubs, beyond everything, means to relegate one's sexuality to a nocturnal dimension, sometimes physically nocturnal, other times metaphorically. In this way it is easy to have almost a double life, to become people who in the daytime are, so to speak, very respectable, serious and who go to the clubs at night or meet "chat people" and so on. What I'm talking about is obviously not an axiom: "since you frequent discotheques and nightclubs, you are split within yourself", but it is a risk that I see very concrete.
This sort of schizophrenia is a bit of a problem in itself, certainly it eases the stress induced by the homophobic context in which we live, but causes a sort of internal split between day and night. A heterosexual doesn’t have this problem or rather it is not said that he has it or better yet it is easier to solve it, if it occurs.”
Sexuality experienced with lightness represents a real possibility and in itself not at all absurd but, first of all, it should really be lived lightly, it should not only have the appearance of lightness concealing beneath itself affective valences more or less frustrated at the individual level and above all it should be shared with people who are fully aware that it is precisely sexuality lived lightly and that therefore the possible expectations should be appropriately reduced. With these premises, that is, with full awareness on both sides that it is sexuality lived lightly, the light gay sexuality is a possible and feasible hypothesis.